Electronic printers are designed to print a complete page line-wise by means of serially presented data. A typical representative of this type of raster output scanner is a laser printer in which a light beam is modulated image-wise and in which said modulated light beam is deflected line-wise by means of a polygonal mirror over a light-sensitive surface. See, e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 4,031,519. A latent image can be written on the surface by means of the modulated light and developed in a known manner. The developed image is transferred to a receiving material such as a sheet of paper.
By means of a work station connected to such printer, test also can be printed on a page. In the front end of the system text is fed in coded form and expanded with font data stored in a memory. The expanded text is also stored in the bit-map memory. In addition, graphical data obtained by means of a scanner from, for example, an original can be supplied to the work station and bit-map memory. See, for example, Graphics Capabilities on a Laser Printer, 1266 Hewlett-Packard Journal, Vol. 34 (Nov. 1983) No. 11, pp. 17-22.
The work station is usually provided with a display by means of which the page to be printed can be assembled. Via the work station, the layout of the page can be varied as desired. With special commands which are entered via the work station, the front end can generate various kinds of line segments, such as straight line segments, circles or circle arcs, etc. and place them in the bit-map memory.
Because the modern laser printers are capable of printing pages at high speed and with a high resolution, the generation of line segments will also have to take place at high speed. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method for generating line segments which corresponds to the high printing speed of the printer.